Reflections on the contemporary church, culture, Christian philosophy and doctrine.

Monday, July 27, 2009

The New Eugenics

And you thought eugenics died with the Nazis! You silly American. Eugenics not only has its modern roots in early 20th century progressivism, it is alive and well among, of all people, our new Science Czar. In some circles at least, his past published works supporting doping the water supply to sterilize entire populations and encouraging forced abortions are coming back to haunt him. Well, sort of.

President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.

Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.

Maybe he has had a kind of conversion and now believes in your right to chose to have a child without a government permit? Not so. William Dembski weighed in on this issue making the point that he has not recanted. Our Science Czar still believes in government controlled eugenics – the act of deciding who gets to be born, who should be aborted, and who should be euthanized. It is, after all, for the common good.

But Dembski makes a further point. Scientists like Holdren consider themselves the priests of the new religion, Materialism. They alone see the problems of the world, and then proceed to act as our saviors. With cool scientific precision, they will (scientifically) solve our problems if we will only do what they say.

Holdren nevertheless represents the powerful new caste of scientists who have appointed themselves the guardians of humanity and the priests of a new social order. Their agenda and pretensions would be transparently obvious except that, with the mantle of their scientific expertise, they intimidate ordinary people from asking the right questions and thereby exposing their aims. Their strategy is always the same: Scientists have discovered a problem that, as their models and data (often falsely) demonstrate, is on the verge of getting out of control; now, if only we do exactly as they say, we'll avoid catastrophe.

Who knows exactly how much sway Holdren will have in the new administration, but the question has to be asked and answered, why appoint a eugenicist in the first place?